The Pale Horse: The Northwest Montana Insurgency and its Aftermath (1987-2002)

Oddly enough, the first group to react to the Plains Massacre was one which, in theory, should have been shielded from immediate knowledge. The majority of Plains’ men of working age were living in an impromptu civilian facility attached to a sizeable logging compound: patrolled by a small detachment of SATPO irregulars augmented by local volunteers, they ought to have been hermetically sealed from outside information. As usual, however, information spread among the civilian population inexplicably quickly: a relief detachment sent out to investigate the compound (whose CYBERSYN terminal operator had been offline for thirty-six hours by this point) on the evening of 23 June found the compound systematically stripped of all of its vehicles and valuable equipment and abandoned except for the bodies of about twenty civilians and all of the irregulars and volunteers. A cursory examination on the part of the relief detachment determined that any of the irregulars and volunteers (as well as, it was later determined, the two ostensibly civilian intelligence assets connected to Brennan’s intelligence-gathering operations) not lucky enough to be killed during the civilians’ initial rush on the guards had been subjected to extensive torture: the intelligence assets and three of the irregulars had been crucified some hours prior to death. The roughly three hundred and fifty escaped civilians, to a man, joined NWF units in the area: desiring no mercy and offering none to SATPO troopers, they developed a reputation as the most fanatical and unwavering insurgents faced by state forces.

The CSA’s leadership, in contrast, spent the first few days after the Plains Massacre with only Kanne’s reassuringly vague report about the pacification of a town in Sanders County as a point of reference: the series of televised interviews conducted by Trooper Allemann for the Pacific Broadcast Network and picked up (entirely illegally) by virtually every house in the CSA West of the Mississippi with access to a TV was as much of a surprise for the Chicago Congress as it was for the CSA’s civilian population.

By itself, Allemann’s testimony could be, and was, painted as a series of wild fabrications by a petty criminal and deserter desperate to find refuge in the PSA. Subsequent developments made this official line somewhat harder to maintain: Captain A and Lieutenant R, both noting the way the wind was blowing and wishing to ensure that their version of events was taken as indicative for the purposes of any future enquiry, both wrote up unofficial reports exculpating themselves entirely from any responsibility for the massacre and submitted these to the highest reasonable level of authority that they could find (the high command of the Army of the CSA in A’s case, the head of the Bureau of Internal Security in R’s).

The submission of these reports had come at an exceptionally unfortunate time for Alexander Haig: by this time the obvious if unacknowledged successor to an ailing Robert McNamara, he had nevertheless accumulated a large body of enemies both within the civilian and military leaderships of the CSA who saw a chance to clip his wings by tarnishing the military operation with which he was associated. These enemies ensured that both reports were unofficially in widespread circulation by mid-August 1992: by late September, the growing clamour for some sort of serious investigation could no longer be ignored.

The CSA’s official response to the allegations, which vacillated wildly at different times between asserting that no such incident as the Plains Massacre had ever happened, suggesting that any civilians killed during the routine pacification of Plains were victims of the NWF and even (at the urging of Brennan) suggesting to northwest Montana’s civilian population, through SATPO’s intelligence apparatus, that the Plains Massacre was the inevitable consequence of prolonged civilian resistance, did nothing to dampen down discontent at the conduct of SATPO. A series of military leaks to sympathetic Congressmen (in particular, the revelation in mid-October of just how much money had been entirely unofficially diverted from the Bureau of Internal Security’s budget to fund SATPO’s Irregular Division) damaged Haig’s position still further: engaged in a desperate fight to safeguard his political standing, he began to distance himself from SATPO for the first time.

Ultimately, Haig was able to prevent a formal enquiry into the Plains Massacre and, by December, had regained his previously unassailable position as successor-designate to McNamara. This had been achieved, however, by throwing much of SATPO under the bus: the Massacre, by now officially acknowledged by the CSA’s civilian leadership, was ascribed in its entirety to the actions of a handful of improperly-trained irregulars, with Haig announcing an end to recruitment efforts of the Irregular Division and the integration of the better irregulars into SATPO’s regular command structure. Brennan, who managed to escape a court martial largely because neither the Bureau of Internal Security nor the Bureau of External Security were prepared to acknowledge responsibility for him, was relegated to an entirely ancillary and officially powerless role within Operation Mountain Lion: by this time largely ignored by Kanne, North and McChrystal, he was to spend the remainder of the First Northwest Montana Insurgency virtually confined to an AFB outside Butte.

The largest effect of the failed movement to hold an enquiry on the Massacre was to manifest itself most fully in the mid-90s. The attempts in the second half of 1992 to hold Haig to account brought together, for the first time, Governors Dennis Kucinich, James Stockdale and Max Baucus and Congressmen James Traficant and R. Budd Dwyer: these men, each with fairly disparate views, would nevertheless form the nucleus of the unofficial Reform Caucus which would ultimately dissolve the CSA. On a less decisive level, the military side of the movement saw the creation of the working partnership between Colonel Andrew Bacevich and academic military theorist William S. Lind which would pose an increasing threat to Operation Mountain Lion in the last eighteen months of its existence.

Ultimately, all of this was of little interest to SATPO in comparison the dazzling moral and operational reverses of 1992. It had started the year calmly and effectively engaged in the slow strangulation of the NWF and in the anticipation that the insurgency would be reduced into a matter best handled by local police forces by 1993: it had ended it shorn of its most official public benefactor, more undermanned (relatively speaking) than ever before, and facing a civilian population which was by now universally sympathetic to the NWF. Operation Mountain Lion was never to regain the initiative.
Interesting, so (some) heads did roll after all...a much greater response then My Lai in OTL, but considering that these are red-blooded Americans SATPO are massacring , I guess its to be expected. Looking forwards to seeing how the war will contribute to the collapse of the CSA.
 
I don't have access to NFL/PRG or VWP recruiting figures, let alone PLAF volunteer numbers. I assume Vietnamese blood is red.
I don't mean to belittle the horror of the My Lai atrocities, but I basically ventured that perhaps the American public would be more outraged by American troops killing their own citizens than citizens of a far off land, as horrible that is.
 
Teaser for the next section:

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Partial radio transcript (23 May 1993)
Partial radio transcript (23 May 1993)

K-CAR: Lonepine. Two miles south-south-west.

ALPHA: Roger that. Any friendlies?

K-CAR: Nothing in the air but us, nothing on the ground but Fronters[1]. Happy hunting, boys.

BRAVO: Bringing the bird in the long way round.

K-CAR: Roger. Call us in if it gets hot.

[ 5M 27S]

ALPHA:…She says she doesn’t think I’m the kind of guy who can be serious, which is ridiculous, ‘cause I’ve had many more serious relationships than she has. Deploying Gatling.

ALPHA GUNNER: (muffled) Roger that, fangs out.

ALPHA: Not many more, necessarily, but at least as many. Touchdown in T-90 seconds.

ALPHA [UNKNOWN]: Roger. Lock and load.

BRAVO: Coming in now. One mile, south-south-west. Deploying AGTM.

K-CAR: Stay at tree level. We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.

ALPHA: Also, define serious relationship. What does that mean?

BRAVO: Monogamous? Is that what she means?

ALPHA: Might be. Because if her definition is-

ALPHA CO-PILOT: ANTI-AIRCRAFT FIRE STRAIGHT AH—

[STATIC]

BRAVO: FUCK.

K-CAR: They’ve got something down there! Break off!

BRAVO: Breaking left! Shit shit shi—

[STATIC]

K-CAR: Bravo? Alpha? Come in, rep—

[PROLONGED STATIC]

[1] Semi-official nickname for NWF combatants.
 
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Deleted member 77383

Awesome alternative history! Question, what proxy wars had occurred within the US (besides the insurgency) and the world during the Cold War? Wars similar to Vietnam and Afghanistan?And how bad is terrorism?
 

Nick P

Donor
Those maps have me wondering what happened. I see a smaller Argentina, a Greater Uruguay and Paraguay, a much-reduced South Africa (Cape Town as Boer Territory?), no Pakistan, independent Hyderabad in India, Ireland as part of the Commonwealth.

Was there a Second World War? Were the US states too busy with their 2nd Civil War?
 
Considering this is from the KR-TL, it is quite odd that Argentina somehow never reunified, Austria-Hungary is allied with Moscow, Serbia somehow lost to Bulgaria and Yucatan separated from a socialist Mexico. Not that disobeying the possible events of KR is an unforgivable sin or anything, but it would be nice if there was an explanation/PoD for them at the very least.
 
That looks like a total Entente victory in Europe as France holds Alsace Lorraine and Germany has somehow lost Bavaria but the Entente has then split in the EU and Commonwealth. Also the Moscow Pact has managed to take South-Eastern Europe but Ukraine and White Ruthenia aren't integrated into Russia which seems odd.
 
Judging from this map, Central Powers break up in interwar period, and TTL WW2 goes down like Germany/ Italy/ China/ Ottoman Empire Vs AH/ Russia/ UK/ France/ Japan, SSA meanwhile are either recovering from civil war, or busy spreading their ideology in Americas. Also that UK-Ireland border seems weird, and Argentina is divided? Did south Argentina have enough population to not collapse?
 
Also I've just noticed that Prince Edward's Island is coloured as being French, how on earth did that happen?
 
Alan Clark’s War (1992-1993)
Alan Clark’s War (1992-1993)

The 2006 assassination in her swimming pool of Gislan Hoch, the socialite daughter of Swiss-Hungarian financier Jan Ludvik Hoch, has spawned a multitude of conspiracy theories: if some of the wilder ones can be believed, her death represents the closure of one of the strangest episodes of British covert diplomacy, one started in the early nineties by a junior Westminster politician with an excess of time on his hands.

In 1992, Alan Clark, the Conservative MP for Plymouth and former Minister for Defence Procurement, found himself out of a front-bench job for the first time in a decade: his unconventional private life, coupled with a mutual dislike for new Prime Minister Tom King, saw him banished to a junior position as liaison to the Commonwealth Ministry. Given little to do, and chafing under the patrician and distant leadership of Commonwealth Minister Anthony Powell, Clark busied himself with the reorganisation of papers covering Western Canada and Pacifica (more in the hopes of being sent on a longer-term fact-finding mission to California than due to a dedication to proper filing procedure) as he plotted his return to frontline politics: a report by a low-level member of the diplomatic staff, covering the Sagebrush Rebellion and containing rough estimates of the number of active NWF insurgents in northwest Montana piqued his interest.

Thanks to Gritz’s courting of the international press, most people were vaguely aware by 1992 that some sort of low-level insurgency was ongoing in northwest Montana, although it was generally assumed that the CSA had the situation broadly in hand: the estimates reviewed by Clark suggested that an overall insurgent victory, or at the very least the temporary crippling of the CSA’s armed forces and the humiliation of its government, was achievable.

To achieve his ends, Clark was able to make use of two key assets: a close working relationship with the senior civil servant within his sector of the Commonwealth Ministry – Peter Cook, the collapse of whose brief and unsuccessful career as a satirist in the early 1960s had driven him to return to his original post-Cambridge plans of a civil service position and who was convinced of the advisability of funding the NWF almost as quickly as Clark had been – and de facto control over approximately £5m of annual discretionary spending (officially earmarked as “Commonwealth diplomatic postage subsidies” but in practice used to fund anything the Government of the day wanted to carry out secretly.

Getting these funds to the NWF was another matter entirely. It was here that Cook proved most immediately useful: exploiting a slight acquaintance with Gislan Hoch, he was able to arrange a series of clandestine meetings with her father Jan, from 1985-1996 the Danubian Confederation’s representative on the Steering Committee of the Brussels International Lending Bank . The precise nature of these meetings and the material covered has never been made public: however, it is unlikely that Hoch, who had been held in a French prisoner-of-war camp from 1943 to 1947 and whose family had been forced to flee the Syndicalist advance into Central Europe, would have objected to the chance to deal a serious blow to the last remaining bastion (even if name only) of International Syndicalism.

What is certain is that within weeks of the last of these meetings, the first of what would become a bewildering and deliberately opaque structure of holding companies, mostly based in non-reporting jurisdictions, was established: by January 1993, this structure held controlling interests in four companies which collectively owned several thousand acres, ostensibly for logging purposes, on the Canadian and Pacifican borders with the CSA. Concurrently, a newly-established company incorporated in the Cayman Islands began to place orders for the newly-developed Starstreak short range man-portable air-defence system with Bombardier Inc. (although sales of these to a non-state entity required approval from the Canadian government, Bombardier found this approval forthcoming surprisingly quickly).

On 15 March 1993, a small commercial aircraft with a flightplan officially filed between Spokane and Calgary veered very slightly off-course, bringing it over about twenty miles of NWF-controlled territory. Hailed by CSA military air traffic control, it apologised and course-corrected. No air assets were scrambled for what was clearly a minor and unimportant mistake: furthermore, the CSA’s radar systems were incapable of picking up the several reinforced pallets pushed from the aircraft during its time in CSA airspace.

The contents of these pallets had made their presence known to SATPO within six weeks: on 23 May 1993, a flight of three helicopters conducting a routine anti-rebel sweep around Lonepine was lost within ninety seconds of each other. No survivors were recovered. Initially, helicopter losses were officially ascribed to mechanical failure: however, the mounting toll rapidly became impossible to explain away. Absent any obvious counter to the Starstreak missiles, SATPO was forced to progressively curtail its use of the helicopter sweeps which had proved so destructive to the NWF from 1989 to 1992: by the summer of 1993, helicopters were effectively reduced to a supporting role in the occasional large-scale operation still conducted by SATPO’s mechanised brigade. These operations were able to keep the major transport and logistical networks in northwest Montana in government hands for the time being: everywhere else, the NWF enjoyed an advance throughout 1993 as inexorable as its retreats from 1989 to 1992. By September, Flathead County was entirely under the de facto control of the NWF: within its capital of Kalispell, the high command of the NWF was about to commence the process of converting a loose assortment of insurgents into a functional state.
 
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K.2

Banned
Alan Clark’s War (1992-1993)

The 2006 assassination in her swimming pool of Gislan Hoch, the socialite daughter of Swiss-Hungarian financier Jan Ludvik Hoch, has spawned a multitude of conspiracy theories: if some of the wilder ones can be believed, her death represents the closure of one of the strangest episodes of British covert diplomacy, one started in the early nineties by a junior Westminster politician with an excess of time on his hands.

In 1992, Alan Clark, the Conservative MP for Plymouth and former Minister for Defence Procurement, found himself out of a front-bench job for the first time in a decade: his unconventional private life, coupled with a mutual dislike for new Prime Minister Tom King, saw him banished to a junior position as liaison to the Commonwealth Ministry. Given little to do, and chafing under the patrician and distant leadership of Commonwealth Minister Anthony Powell, Clark busied himself with the reorganisation of papers covering Western Canada and Pacifica (more in the hopes of being sent on a longer-term fact-finding mission to California than due to a dedication to proper filing procedure) as he plotted his return to frontline politics: a report by a low-level member of the diplomatic staff, covering the Sagebrush Rebellion and containing rough estimates of the number of active NWF insurgents in northwest Montana piqued his interest.

Thanks to Gritz’s courting of the international press, most people were vaguely aware by 1992 that some sort of low-level insurgency was ongoing in northwest Montana, although it was generally assumed that the CSA had the situation broadly in hand: the estimates reviewed by Clark suggested that an overall insurgent victory, or at the very least the temporary crippling of the CSA’s armed forces and the humiliation of its government, was achievable.

To achieve his ends, Clark was able to make use of two key assets: a close working relationship with the senior civil servant within his sector of the Commonwealth Ministry – Peter Cook, the collapse of whose brief and unsuccessful career as a satirist in the early 1960s had driven him to return to his original post-Cambridge plans of a civil service position and who was convinced of the advisability of funding the NWF almost as quickly as Clark had been – and de facto control over approximately £5m of annual discretionary spending (officially earmarked as “Commonwealth diplomatic postage subsidies” but in practice used to fund anything the Government of the day wanted to carry out secretly.

Getting these funds to the NWF was another matter entirely. It was here that Cook proved most immediately useful: exploiting a slight acquaintance with Gislan Hoch, he was able to arrange a series of clandestine meetings with her father Jan, from 1992-1994 the holder of the revolving chairmanship of the Brussels International Lending Bank as the Danubian Confederation’s representative. The precise nature of these meetings and the material covered has never been made public: however, it is unlikely that Hoch, who had been held in a French prisoner-of-war camp from 1943 to 1947 and whose family had been forced to flee the Syndicalist advance into Central Europe, would have objected to the chance to deal a serious blow to the last remaining bastion (even if name only) of International Syndicalism.

What is certain is that within weeks of the last of these meetings, the first of what would become a bewildering and deliberately opaque structure of holding companies, mostly based in non-reporting jurisdictions, was established: by January 1993, this structure held controlling interests in four companies which collectively owned several thousand acres, ostensibly for logging purposes, on the Canadian and Pacifican borders with the CSA. Concurrently, a newly-established company incorporated in the Cayman Islands began to place orders for the newly-developed Starstreak short range man-portable air-defence system with Bombardier Inc. (although sales of these to a non-state entity required approval from the Canadian government, Bombardier found this approval forthcoming surprisingly quickly).

On 15 March 1993, a small commercial aircraft with a flightplan officially filed between Spokane and Calgary veered very slightly off-course, bringing it over about twenty miles of NWF-controlled territory. Hailed by CSA military air traffic control, it apologised and course-corrected. No air assets were scrambled for what was clearly a minor and unimportant mistake: furthermore, the CSA’s radar systems were incapable of picking up the several reinforced pallets pushed from the aircraft during its time in CSA airspace.

The contents of these pallets had made their presence known to SATPO within six weeks: on 23 May 1993, a flight of three helicopters conducting a routine anti-rebel sweep around Lonepine was lost within ninety seconds of each other. No survivors were recovered. Initially, helicopter losses were officially ascribed to mechanical failure: however, the mounting toll rapidly became impossible to explain away. Absent any obvious counter to the Starstreak missiles, SATPO was forced to progressively curtail its use of the helicopter sweeps which had proved so destructive to the NWF from 1989 to 1992: by the summer of 1993, helicopters were effectively reduced to a supporting role in the occasional large-scale operation still conducted by SATPO’s mechanised brigade. These operations were able to keep the major transport and logistical networks in northwest Montana in government hands for the time being: everywhere else, the NWF enjoyed an advance throughout 1993 as inexorable as its retreats from 1989 to 1992. By September, Flathead County was entirely under the de facto control of the NWF: within its capital of Kalispell, the high command of the NWF was about to commence the process of converting a loose assortment of insurgents into a functional state.
Aaand we’re back. Great stuff, as expected. The NWF now has the high ground militarily, but let’s see if it can keep political cohesion in near-victory...which it probably won’t, but still. Fun. 👍
 
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